Tag: code review

The Xen project is an open source software project that does pre-commit peer code review. This means that every change to the source code follows a code review process, in which any developer can participate, before being accepted in the code base. During that process, the patch is carefully inspected and improved thanks to the contributions of the reviewers. The process takes place in the xen-devel mailing list.

Code review is a very important process to improve the quality of the final product, but it can also be very time-consuming, and impose too much effort on the reviewers and the developers themselves. Therefore, when a few people in the Xen Project detected an apparent increase in the number of messages devoted to code review, they become concerned. They decided to use the services of Bitergia to determine what was happening, and how it could impact the code review process of the project. And the report “Code review process analysis in the Xen Project” was born.

Time-to-merge in Xen, per semester

The main objective of the analysis (composed of two stages) was to verify if this apparent increase was really related to the code review process, and to study other parameters to determine if the code review process was deteriorating in some way. The first stage has already been completed, with three key findings:

Time-to-merge, probably the most important parameter to express the toll that a project is paying for reviewing code, is under control. Time-to-merge is counted from the moment a change is proposed, to the moment that change is merged, after running its corresponding code review.

Time-to-merge increased from 2012 to the first semester of 2014, running from about 15 days (for 75% of the changes), to close to 30 days. But since then, time-to-merge has decreased: 28 days in the second semester of 2014, and 20 in 2015 (again, for 75% of changes).

The trend of time-to-merge is similar despite the size of the change. The same trend is observed for changes composed of one, two, three, four or more than four patches (individual components of a change).

Currently, the second stage of the analysis is being performed. It is expected that this stage will produce actionable dashboards with detailed information that will allow to track in detail the main parameters of the Xen code review process.

These findings and more will be shown in our talk at OSCON. Remember that we will be exhibiting there and you can get a discount using BITERGIA25 code… Don’t miss the chance to visit us there!

In a large free, open source software development community, not all developers are equal. Some are more experienced, some are better known, some know better how to adhere to the uses and customs of the project, some write code that is more easily accepted by others. One of the areas where these differences are more noticeable is the code review process. It is not equally easy for all developers to push their patches through code review. Even when the process itself tries to be fair and unbiased, well, “all developers are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Fortunately, we have plenty of data in the code review system. We can use analytics on that data to learn about how difficult it is for developers to get their patches accepted. We will use a OpenStack code review dashboard, composed with data from the OpenStack Gerrit instance to illustrate the process.

This dashboard includes information about all review processes (changesets) in OpenStack, using information obtained from their Gerrit instance. For each review, we have information such as the submitter (owner), the time it was first uploaded and accepted or abandoned, the number of patchsets (iterations) needed until it was accepted, and the time until it was merged or abandoned. With all of them we have prepared an active visualization that allows both to understand the big picture and to drill down looking for the details. Follow on reading to learn about some of these details.

[Note: this is our second post about our dashboards based on Kibana. If you’re interested, have a look at the first one, about OpenStack code contributions.]

Having a dashboard usually opens new paths to understand software development communities. This may be seen as the entry point that helps to understand the basics of a community. And on top of this, there may appear new questions related to those basics or to more advanced issues. This is the case of the new work we are working on with the Wikimedia community metrics analytics team: Core Reviewer and Participants.

Core reviewers are defined as those developers that can exercise a +2/-2 review in Gerrit. In addition to this, it is of interest for the community to remove auto merges. Although this is an undesired behaviour, that takes place, and those should be removed.

On the other hand, Participants in Gerrit are defined as any member leaving any type of trace in the system. In this set we can find reviews (-2,-1,+1,+2), uploads, comments and others.

It is interesting to notice that depending on the community, requirements are slightly different. In the case of the OpenStack community, there are extra requirements for the Core Reviewer definition. And this is that reviews should be found in master branch. This specific measure can be found in the OpenStack quarterly reports for each of the projects of the Foundation.

Bitergia, the software development analytics company

Bitergia is focused on software development analytics. We aim to produce useful information about how software projects are performing, how different actors are contributing and how they could be improved.

We provide tools and means to track all these aspects, and to evaluate how policies and decisions are shaping the development processes.